Posts Tagged ‘MineNinja’

The controller for the iBeLink DM384M DASH (X11) ASIC Miner is running on the Raspberry Pi inside the device and is apparently based on the MineNinja Open Source/Free Platform for Bitcoin Mining on the Ti BeagleBone Black that is modified for the specific hardware. You get a basic web-based interface for configuration and monitoring of the mining hardware, once you plug in the device in your network and turn it on it will get a dynamic IP if you have DHCP running, but you should be able to access it via the default “iBeLink” hostname if you do not know the IP. The backend used for the actual mining process is apparently a fork of cgminer 3.5.5 that the device is being shipped with, but there is a new version available that you can update to directly from the web interface. The latest cgminer 3.5.6 version adds support for the NiceHash extranonce, so that if you are selling your X11 hashrate there you should be getting very little rejected shares thus maximizing performance.

The management from the web-based interface is pretty basic and very easy to use, you can add/remove pools and set email notifications for low hashrate or too many rejects. Unfortunately there is no temperature monitoring available on a hardware level and thus no notification for potential cooling issues or an option to shutdown the hardware in case of failure of the cooling or from overheating. Temperature monitoring can also be helpful if/when you are overclocking or underclocking the device in order to optimize it for maximum performance or efficiency for example. So there is more to be desired for any future products, but for first generation it is actually pretty good for a starting point to build on. Another thing that needs extra work is the status of the device as the currently reported local rates do not seem very accurate especially in terms of hashrate or at least the numbers are confusing, so you need to look at the poolside reports for details.

The most interesting part of the software is the blade configuration page and more specifically the PLL frequency that can be used to overclock or underclock the miner as we have already seen some time ago when the online manual for the device was published. The default setting for PLL is 110 MHz and the software says the maximum setting is 115 MHz, but the good news is that it accepts 116 or 117 as well, so higher frequencies should be possible and we have seen an increase of power usage as we increase the operating frequency. This however needs more testing and we would advice to be careful with overclocking in order to avoid possible overheating of the chips or overloading of the power supply and thus maybe even damaging your mining hardware.

And now for some potential issues that we are seeing for the moment. There is no source code available for the cgminer fork used by the device, there is even no binary release or full RPi image release available yet. So integration into other mining software or further optimizing or maybe adding other features is problematic as they need to be released by the makers of the device only. It seems that there are no plans for making the source code available, though we should soon have a backup image of the complete Raspberry Pi software in order to be able to restore it if something fails. With that said there is no official website or contact details available for support form the hardware manufacturer, so the only way to communicate with them is the dedicated iBeLink DM384M ASIC Dash Miner Support Thread on the DashTalk forum and this is not the best way to do more serious business and provide support for your customers. So thee is more to be desired for sure, but things are moving in the right direction, it will probably just take some more time… and if iBeLink does not do it right an upcoming competitor might quickly overtake the new X11 ASIC market, that is if they manage to do things better and we are yet to see something like that happening.

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